About Me

Monday, August 20, 2012

Mr. Terrific (original TV pilot) (Universal, 1966)

One item we watched last
night was a really weird thing I got from archive.org, a download of the first,
rejected pilot for a short-lived 1967 TV show on NBC called Mr. Terrific (a similar show called Captain Nice aired right after it on CBS and you could watch
both if you changed the channel at the right moment), a superhero spoof in
which a nebbish named Stanley Beamish turned out to be the only person in the
entire U.S. who could take a special pill invented by a secret government
agency to give its user super-powers. The show actually lasted 17 episodes, but
before that they shot a rejected pilot starring Alan Young, the actor who’d
played the human companion of the equine title character in Mr. Ed, and Edward Andrews (in what was basically the
counterpart to Edward Platt’s character on Get Smart!), before deciding they wanted young and nerdy in
the title role rather than middle-aged and nebbishy. It was a pretty silly show
— obviously NBC and Universal were
going after the audience that had made the 1966 Batman TV series, with its blatantly campy approach, a
smash hit — and the plot, to the extent there was one, featured the chief of
the secret agency being kidnapped by a bunch of Russian agents disguised as an
ice-skating troupe. I found that the 17 episodes that were actually aired in
1967-68 were collected on a four-DVD boxed set and issued by a company called —
I’m not making this up, you know! — “Old Westerns for Cancer” because they
ostensibly sell these old movies and TV shows to raise money for people with
cancer who need help covering the ghastly expense of treatment in the U.S.